A Hedon's Life.

You Will Never Kill Piracy, and Piracy Will Never Kill You

An excellent article on forbes.com that discusses what everybody should already realise what the problem with the corporations vs piracy war. It isn’t that people love stealing things, I think lots of people that do download movies and music or share them “illegally” with friends actually dislike “stealing” the things they download.

It also reminds me of the discussion I had with burn-cities-burn about a music service that I would pay for.

I came to the decision that I would:

• pay up to $150 (AUD) for a service where I could have 24 hour access to a library of my music that I could listen to by just logging into a program/website from my computer, phone and/or laptop. 
• I should be able to add any song I like to my library of music. 
• I would also probably pay extra to be able to download any amount of songs to my hard drive so I can listen to them offline.
• If you’re one of those people who don’t listen to music like I do (which is on a near constant basis) you should be able to just buy a high quality downloads, I would probably pay more for .flac downloads than 128kbps downloads. And I would never pay $10 for an album that is anything less than 320kbps mp3.
• Of course this set up isn’t without its flaws. For one internet speed and download capacity in Australia (while it is improving) is lacking incredibly for a service like this.

Tl;dr

Subscription service for constant access to music I can listen to anywhere with internet access.
Paying extra for a “Premium” service that allows up to at least 100gb of unlimited music downloads a year, up to 200-250gb for .flac downloads.
Alternative “pay for what you want” service for occasional listeners, where you can download the same album as many times as you want in case computer failure.

So far the best service I’ve seen for musicians and listeners is bandcamp. It’s easy for artists to set up and easy for users to download. Artists just need to upload a .wav (or similar quality) file off their songs and bandcamp automatically converts it into all the possible formats a listener might want with correct id3 tags and album art when possible.